


Revelations

by Nemainofthewater



Category: Highlander: The Series, The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Don't copy to another site, Friendship, Gen, Methos POV, Methos meets gertrude, Rare Pairs 2020, Swearing, at all ages, gertrude is badass, he might have preferred not to, of a kind - Freeform, what's a little murder between friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:14:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22456291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemainofthewater/pseuds/Nemainofthewater
Summary: Methos has been having dreams. Dreams of Gertrude Robinson swaddled by black tentacles.
Relationships: Methos & Gertrude Robinson
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22
Collections: The Magnus Archives Rare Pairs 2020





	Revelations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gina3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gina3/gifts).



> Written for the Magnus Archives Rare Pairs Challenge 2020.

_San Francisco, 2015_

Methos opened his eyes, one hand desperately clutching for the dagger that he kept under his pillow while the other reached out for the sword hidden under his bed. There was adrenaline coursing through his system and his sweat-soaked sheets clung to him as he sat up and swung his feet out of bed to rest on the cool tile of his apartment floor. He sat there and let the minutes tick by, calming himself with each measured exhale. It was a good thing that he- or rather that Michael Stevenson- had come into a rather large inheritance when his great-uncle had died. It meant that he was able to afford a modest studio apartment in the Mission District and didn’t have to succumb to the modern-day worker’s plight: flatmates. It wasn’t, however, enough to afford anything larger than a shoebox and his walls were regrettably thin.

It was a good thing that he hadn’t screamed. He couldn’t deal with the hassle. Not now. And it would have been hard to explain why Michael Stevenson, 29-year-old businessman, was crying out in Sumerian.

Clinically, Methos dropped his dagger and stared at his left hand. It was shaking. It hadn’t stopped shaking since he woke up. He swallowed and closed his eyes, pushing the remnants of his dreams from his mind.

He shook his head. It was no use. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get rid of the image of Gertrude Robinson out of his head. He had been trapped, motionless, unable to even blink as she stared at him, her eyes the only thing visible through the writhing and twisting black tentacles that encased her.

“Gertrude,” he whispered. “What the hell have you done?”

_Oxford, 1969_

“Who the hell are you?”

Methos blinked up owlishly. He hadn’t let his guard down, not as such, but he also hadn’t been expecting to be interrupted. His tweed and jumper and too-long hair, combed back at the sides with an abominable amount of hair gel, were all carefully calculated to allow him to fade into the background. Nothing more than another student. So when he had holed himself up in the Bodleian for the day, to mentally prepare himself for the next day’s supervision with, despite stiff competition, the dullest academic in Oxford, he had not been expecting to be interrupted.

Staring at him with all the confidence of the Pope and the disdain of the average cat, was another student. Somerville, Methos would guess from her red-and-black patterned scarf. It was hard to tell how old she was: honestly somewhere in the last 5,000 years everyone he met looked like an infant. Oh, it wasn’t their physical characteristics, the lines of their face or the colour of their hair. No, it was their eyes. Their damnably young eyes. Still, the student was probably a postgraduate with the way she was looking at him. Undergraduates were shy little creatures in his experience, easily spooked.

“Er,” he said. “Benjamin Straub? I er. I read Philosophy at St Peter’s?”

He gestured at the books strewn across his table, offering them up as proof of his bona fide-ness. He completed the performance with a little shrug of his shoulder and a shy smile, ducking his head and peering up through his lashes.

“You’re in my space,” she said, ignoring him. She reached out and started to stack his books in a messy pile.

“Hey!” he said, scrambling forward to rescue his journal. It was written in a mixture of Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, but there was a fair chance of it being understood here. “What are you doing? You can’t- it’s first come, first serve! And I’ve been here for hours, so-”

Gods, Benjamin Straub was a whiny little arse. But he was a useful idiot whom no one expected anything of. So long as he kept his head down and finished his degree he could slide easily into middle management in a few years while also taking the opportunity to…edit…a few texts concerning him kept at the Bodleian. All he needed to do was- pun fully intended- keep his head.

The girl glared at him. She had incredibly dark eyes, so much so that her irises blended into her pupils making Methos feel as though she was staring into his very soul. The back of his neck prickled, the fine hairs standing on end. For one brief moment, he was pinned in place by her gaze unable to move or think or even breath. She looked down, and he was free.

Methos had not lived to his advance age by ignoring his instincts.

“No!” he said. “No, you’re right. I’ve been here in your space for too long, please forgive me.”

He snatched the books out of the girl’s hands, stuffed his journal and his notes into his bag and stood.

“Sorry for the misunderstanding,” he said, and then he fled.

_San Francisco, 2015_

“Come on, come on,” he muttered into the phone. “Pick up Dawson!”

“This is Joe Dawson-”

“-finally!-“

“-not available at the moment, please leave a message and I’ll get back to you-”

“Dammit Joe!”

Methos hung up with a glare, mourning the days that he could end a phone call by slamming the receiver down and not have to worry about cracking his screen. It was 6am in San Francisco, which meant that it was 3pm in Paris and that Joe had no excuse when it came to not answering his phone. 

“This would all go a lot easier if you’d just switch the damn thing on once in a while,” he growled. He sighed. Joe had retired, five years ago now, though that didn’t seem to deter the mass of trainee Watchers that flocked to his bar. It did mean that the man had taken to turning his phone off and disappearing to sit in some old jazz club whenever he couldn’t take the constant questions. Hilarious when MacLeod wanted to find him, less funny when Methos did.

He leant back and pinched the bridge of his nose to stave off the incipient headache. He’d been awake through the night, dosing himself with caffeine in order to stay awake. He still couldn’t quite rid himself of the image of Gertrude, drowning in inky tentacles, from his mind’s eye.

“Fuck,” he said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

And then he opened his laptop and started searching for flights to London.

_Oxford, 1969_

“So,” Methos said faintly, staring down at the melted remains in front of him. “Not an undergraduate at Somerville, I take it?”

The girl looked no less disdainful when holding a pistol in one hand and an old book in the other. Methos eyed the book warily; at first it looked non-descript, but the longer that he looked at it the more he could feel the dizzying vertigo of the high, Tibetan mountains and the unmistakeable scent of ozone caught at the back of his throat. He swayed on the spot. Of course, it didn’t help that the pile of wax before him had once a person not two minutes ago.

“Gertrude Robinson,” the girl said. “Head Archivist at the Magnus Institute, London.”

The Magnus Institute. Methos had heard vague murmurings of it since its inception in 1818, but those had mostly been about its…esoteric research. Methos had only met Jonah Magnus once, but that had been enough for him to avoid the man forever after. He had been intense, and considering that they had been at one of _Byron’s_ parties and therefore surrounded by aristocrats battling their own internal demons dimly viewed through a light opium haze, that was saying something. There was something of Magnus’ watchful intensity in Gertrude’s eyes.

His decision to steer clear of Jonah Magnus had evidently been the correct one. In that vein-

“Nice to meet you,” he said politely, and then started backing away as quickly as possible. Gertrude narrowed her eyes and swung her weapon up to aim at his head. He froze.

“I swear I won’t tell anyone about this,” he said. “We can go our separate ways-”

There was a loud BANG and Methos looked down in resignation at the spreading stain on his chest.

“Fuck,” he said, and then collapsed.

_San Francisco Airport, 2015_

“And you’re sure that you don’t have anything else?” Methos smiled as winningly as possible at the British Airways employee. “Business class? Premium economy, even. I can pay-”

“I’m sorry Mr Stevenson, but there’s nothing free. We’re running an unusually busy flight this morning. It’s only due to a last-minute cancellation that we have your current seat open. If you’re willing to wait-”

“No,” Methos said. “It has to be this one.”

“Family emergency?”

“Something like that.”

He smiled politely and then collected his ticket. A middle row in economy. Great. No doubt surrounded by screaming infants and over-friendly Americans. He turned, half-tempted to give it up and find a good microbrewery-

-and the image returned, the dark vines and Gertrude’s dark eyes flashing in front of his face. He groaned.

“Fine,” he said, addressing his apparent Patron and ignoring the strange looks. “You win. England it is.”

_Istanbul, 2008_

Gertrude hadn’t changed in the intervening fifty years. Oh, her hair was grey, and her skin was wrinkled but her eyes- her eyes were the same. Dark as a black hole and twice as captivating. As was the fact that as soon as she had seen Adam Pierson, mild-mannered researcher, she had shot him.

Methos revived to find her gun pointed straight at his head and holding a device that looked suspiciously like-

He glanced down at himself. Yes, those were explosives surrounding him. Enough explosives that they’d have no trouble blowing him to pieces, thereby removing his head.

“I don’t want to use them, Benjamin,” Gertrude said. “Frankly, they’re rather hard to source and I need them for something else. I will not, however, hesitate if you don’t answer my questions.”

Methos groaned. “I can’t believe this. I survive years palling around with Mr ‘Immortal-Central’ and his stupid prophecy, and this is what kills me?”

Waking up to find that he had been stuffed in a salt-filled wooden box had not been pleasant and Methos was certain that he had suffocated at least twice over before he had managed to escape that thrice-bedamned storage unit. He had given both the Magnus Institute and its insane Head Archivist a wide berth after that, going so far as to pay private investigators to inform him whenever Gertrude Robinson left London. Which she did with alarming regularity. He had been therefore been incredibly surprised to see her staring straight at him over his dinner of Köfte in the Great Bazaar. 

The gun clicked, cocked and ready to fire.

“You’re a little trigger happy, aren’t you?” Methos said, staring up at the sky.

“You learn to be proactive in my line of work,” Gertrude replied, her voice as dry as the Sahara Desert.

“Is there any way that this ends with me not blown to pieces?”

“That very much depends on you, Benjamin. Now. Tell me about the demon Ahriman.”

_Heathrow, 2015_

11 hours and eight time zones later his headache had morphed into a full-blown migraine and he was feeling the lack of sleep. He stumbled through the indifferent masses of Heathrow Airport and longed for his

“You had better be in trouble, Gertrude,” he said.

“Oh, she is.” Between blinks, she appeared. Tall and thin and dark skinned, was entirely unremarkable. The only think that marked her as Other were the cobwebs glinting in her bleach-blonde hair.

“Excuse me,” Methos said, ducking his head and rushing past. Or trying to. Because his legs- without bothering to ask for the permission or input of his brain- had slowed until he was standing, facing her.

“Annabelle Cane, I presume?” he said.

Annabelle laughed in delight, revealing slightly crooked teeth and at least five penny spiders.

“Because I could not stop for Death-” she said, her voice mocking, “-he kindly stopped for me-”

“Is there a point to this?”

“Hush,” she said, holding an admonishing finger to his lips. “It’s rude to interrupt. Where was I? Oh yes. The carriage held just ourselves-”

“-and immortality.” Methos finished the poem, voice numb. “What do you want, Annabelle?”

“Want?” she asked in surprise. “Nothing at all Methos. Just- a little talk.”

_Toulouse, 2014_

“Benjamin,” Gertrude said. “Thank you for joining us.”

Methos rolled his eyes and slumped further down into his chair. He sipped moodily at his overpriced cappuccino.

“A funny thing about world-ending rituals; they tend to affect the entire world. And as it happens, I rather enjoy being alive.” He gestured toward the café, his cappuccino, the annoying American tourists. “I’ve already lived through the Stone Age, I don’t need an Eldritch fear plunging us back into it.”

“Hmm.”

Methos ignored Gertrude’s unimpressed look instead looking at her companion. He looked to be in his early-to-late thirties with long, badly dyed black hair. His pallor looked less an aesthetic choice and more the colouring of a man deathly ill. Catching his appraising stare, he glared at Methos. It did nothing to disguise the hollows under his eyes or his painful thinness.

“Who’s your friend?” Methos asked. “Traded Michael in for a younger model?”

“Gerard is helping me with, now that old age is catching me up,” Gertrude said. “I’m not as young as I once was and not everyone has your…talents.”

“Cut the crap,” Methos said.

“Very well.”

She carefully lowered herself into a café chair, waving off the waiter who had appeared from behind the bar to help her in.

“Deux cafés au lait, s’il-vous-plaît,” she said in careful and accented French. The waiter nodded at her and hurried off to do her bidding. Methos rather knew how he felt. 

“Now,” she said. “Let’s get down to business. Tell me about Benoît Maçon.”

_London, 2015_

They settled into one of the hundreds of Prêt-à-Mangers, looking at each other warily over their drinks. He knew where they were. Knew that the Institute was a mere five-minute walk away. He knew that if he stood up and left then he could finally find Gertrude and figure out what, exactly, she had got herself into this time. He stayed seated.

“What have I done to warrant the attention of the Web?” Methos asked after a careful ten minutes of silent posturing.

Annabelle laughs at him. There are spiderwebs dripping from her fingertips and covering her caramel macchiato.

“You? Nothing. The Mother of Puppets knows better than to interfere with the End. I wouldn’t dream of interfering with Death himself.”

Methos scowled and dropped the persona of Michael Stevenson completely until nothing was left but the Horseman.

“What-” he said, and his voice was the voice of one who had crushed entire civilisations under his feet, “-do you want. Answer me now and I will let you live.”

“Hmm,” Annabelle said. “Tempting. But no. I don’t think so. Not yet. It has been an honour to finally meet the Horseman, though.”

She stood. Slowly. Taking the time to smooth out her blouse and shrug into her coat. Methos glared at her. He couldn’t do much else. No matter how hard he tried.

“I’m looking forward to our next meeting, Methos,” she said. “Do give my regards to Gertrude.”

And then she walked through the door and disappeared into the crowd. Distantly, Methos could hear sirens.

_Toulouse, 2014_

“You do know that he’s one of us, don’t you?”

There was a pause as they both stared out at Gerard who, as the youngest member of their party, had been sent to collect François Duschamps written statement. There was a lot of gesticulating going and angry voices.

“I suspected, yes. Gerard Keay has been touched by most of the Entities in his lifetime. Why not the End?”

“Cancer,” Methos said, “Is a terrible way to die. It’s slow and insidious, and unnecessarily painful. I don’t understand why you’re letting this happen.”

Gertrude raised a pointed brow. “I thought that you were all for letting your so-called ‘pre-Immortals’ succumb to a natural death if that was their fate.”

“In general? Yes. But I know you Gertrude. I know you very well. There’s nothing more that you would like than an Immortal assistant, ready to throw themselves into the Rituals and Rites and come out the other side ready to be sacrificed again.”

“Why, Benjamin,” Gertrude said. “That’s why I have you."

Methos snorted but didn’t reply. It was true enough. And he, at least, was canny and quick enough to throw himself out of danger whenever Gertrude was in her more…explosive…moods.

“I hope that you don’t expect me to teach him,” he said. “It’s been centuries since I had a student, and that turned out poorly.”

“In that case, you’ll be glad to know that your services will emphatically not be needed. I have other plans for Gerard.”

“You’re a stone-cold bitch,” Methos said.

“I am,” she agreed, “But the world is still standing so I must be doing something right. Now, I must be off. I have a plane to Pittsburg to catch.”

“Pittsburg.” Methos shuddered. “Good luck with that. I will most certainly not be joining you.”

He turned to leave but paused as Gertrude called out after him:

“Take care of yourself,” she said and there was something in her voice that was not vulnerability but might have been its close cousin. He paused one more moment.

And then he walked away.

**Author's Note:**

> A few notes:  
> -Methos' name in 2015 is Michael because I really couldn't resist.  
> -his surnames (apart from Adam Pierson) are all taken from classic horror writers  
> -all Immortals are Avatars of the End whether they like it or not. Methos is fervently on the _not_ side of that spectrum  
> -Gertrude was investigating Hilltop Road when she was in Oxford. Running into Methos was just a nice bonus.  
> -Young Gertrude was definitely going to throw Methos' body into one ritual or another. Waste not, want not. Good job he got out of her storage unit, really.  
> -A book page is a lot more secure than a baby immortal. What if someone had accidentally Gerard's head? Then what would have happened to all his knowledge?
> 
> I am on Tumblr as [Nemainofthewater ](https://nemainofthewater.tumblr.com)


End file.
